October 23, 2012 On the Shelf The Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone, and Other News By Sadie Stein Call now! How to Sharpen Pencils comes to a TV near you. Robert Gottlieb talks about editing the lurid novel The Best of Everything. “A Dog barks, someone eats a watermelon, a car drives away”: the signifiers of literary fiction. “Harriet Klausner claims to be a speed-reader. In the last decade, this former librarian has reviewed over 28,000 books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other sites.” On unmasking an online phenomenon. Following Mo Yan’s Nobel win, the Chinese government has announced plans to turn his childhood home into the “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 22, 2012 Bulletin See You There: The Paris Review in L.A. By Sadie Stein Los Angeles friends! Please join us tomorrow as we celebrate the art of the short story at the Hammer Museum! Author Mona Simpson, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, and yours truly will discuss literary life and read selected stories from the new Paris Review anthology Object Lessons, with Q&A to follow. Event details here. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 22, 2012 At Work Heroine Worship: Talking with Kate Zambreno By Christopher Higgs Kate Zambreno’s first book, O Fallen Angel, won Chiasmus Press’s “Undoing the Novel” First Book Contest, and her second book, Green Girl, was a finalist for the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. So it should come as no surprise that her provocative new work, Heroines, published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents imprint next month, challenges easy categorization, this time by poetically swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history, criticism, and theory. With equal parts unabashed pathos and exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity to produce an impressive and original work that examines the suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno’s own complicated position as a writer and a wife. It concludes by bringing the problems of the modernists into conversation with the contemporary by offering a timely consideration of the role of the Internet and blogs in creating a community for women writers. What was it about the modernist wives that first interested you? I think I came to the wives through an initial discovery of more neglected modernist women writers—Olive Moore, Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, maybe I’d add Jean Rhys to that list. I was living in London working in a bookshop and not doing much in terms of trying to write a novel, so I pitched to Chad Post at Dalkey that I write an essay on Kavan. And because I had nothing else to do, I sat in the British Library and read everything by her. And started reading all these other experimental women writers, like Elizabeth Smart—not the Mormon abductee, but the one obsessed with the poet George Barker, an obsession she documents in the amazing By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Not a modernist, I know, but I sat at the British Library and read the communal notebook she kept with Barker and thought about Vivien(ne)’s hand on “The Waste Land” manuscript. I began to be really interested in ideas of literary collaboration. Read More
October 22, 2012 Bulletin The Paris Review App By The Paris Review Have you heard the news? Two weeks ago we launched our very own iPad/iPhone app, which features new issues, rare back issues, and archival collections—along with our complete interview series and the Paris Review Daily. And best of all, it’s free! The New York Daily News called it “a real treasure”; Gizmodo named it app of the day; and The Rumpus recommends it over an M.F.A.! Current print subscribers, you’re in luck: we’ve granted free digital access to any issue covered by your print subscription! If you’re a print subscriber and haven’t already heard from us, send us an e-mail at support [at] theparisreview.org. To those with Android devices: we hope to have a version for you soon!
October 22, 2012 On the Shelf Literary Salons, Unfilmable Books By Sadie Stein The Cleveland Public Library introduces a new library card commemorating the life of Cleveland-based author, film subject, and misanthrope Harvey Pekar. The Pekar-edition card will be available from this month at branches of CPL. Everyone’s a salonniere: Louis Vuitton has started a Parisian literary salon. Well, sort of. It also sells stuff. And will later be incorporated into the LV boutique, so. “I start a book in 1978 and finish it 34 years later, without enjoying a single minute of the enterprise.” Joe Queenan’s reading habits. The alternative approach: how to talk about books you haven’t read. Allegedly unfilmable books. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 19, 2012 Books Finnegans Wake: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak I wanted to illustrate something impossible, so I chose Finnegans Wake. It would be silly for me to draw in a few panels a work that took James Joyce seventeen years to complete. So I cheated. The name of the book comes from a nineteenth Century drinking song, “Finnegan’s Wake” (note the apostrophe). The song is about death and rebirth, and ends in a whisky-fueled brouhaha. There is little in agreement, on the other hand, on what Joyce’s book is about. Reading a page at random from Finnegans Wake is a bit like trying to read while drunk. But death and rebirth are undoubtedly major themes, as the book begins halfway through its final sentence. So here’s a single strand of DNA—perhaps the first—in Joyce’s impossibly dense opus infinitum. Pause Play Play Prev | Next Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.